REVIEW: Amazon's New Fire Phone Has Some Fun Features, But You're Going To Miss All The Best Apps

Amazon's first smartphone, the Fire Phone, hits stores July 25,
and comes bundled with a free year of Amazon Prime, which
includes free shipping on thousands of items as well as a growing
selection of free movies, books, and music.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
introduced the phone at its launch event by saying that the
company decided to try something completely innovative and
different.

The Fire Phone certainlyis different thanks to its 3-D effects
and camera mode that can automatically identify real-world
objects, but it's still missing essential apps and services the
iPhone and Android phones already have.

I gave the Fire a test-run over the weekend to check out what it
had to offer.

Using It

The Fire phone has two main hyped-up features: Dynamic
Perspective, which allows the phone to react to how you hold,
view, and move it, and Firefly, which can scan objects like
books, movies, posters, QR codes, and household goods to give you
more information about them.

Dynamic perspective gets showcased right off the bat through the
phone's lock screen: It comes with 19 different interactive
options that are undeniably cool, especially the first time you
see them. Although they're a good introduction to what dynamic
perspective can do (images on the screen appear to have depth,
and the scene shifts as you move your phone), most people
probably don't really care about what their lock
screens look like. The feature comes in handy mostly for
navigating the phone's interface and in games.

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When you first get the phone, it takes a little while to get used
to the one-handed gestures possible with dynamic perspective. You
can tilt the phone side-to-side to reveal additional panels and
up or down to auto-scroll, or angle it slightly it to reveal
"layered" information, like Yelp reviews when you're looking at
restaurants on a map.

After playing around with the phone for several days, I found
myself using the gestures about 60% of the time, and just swiping
the rest of it. I'd imagine that it's one of those things that
you'd become more adapted to the more you used it though, and
definitely valuable if you want to be able to do more with only
one hand.

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Dynamic perspective really shines when it comes to games, though.
I found "Snow Spin," a game that lets you use your head to
control the path of a little snowboarding penguin, completely
charming and immersive. Yes, you will look ridiculous playing,
but it's unlike any other smartphone game experience out
there.

Amazon also just announced a list of some
other apps that take advantage of feature, and released two new
games from its own Amazon Game Studio. The promise seems to be
that there are more to come, too. But that's a lofty promise.
There's very little incentive for developers to start making
special games for a brand new smartphone platform with 0% market
share. As we've learned over and over, developers still prefer to
make the best apps for iPhone first, then Android, then
everything else.

The phone itself also takes advantage of dynamic perspective in
fun, subtle ways: Every app icon on the phone looks like it has
depth when you tilt it. The on-off switch in the Wi-Fi part of
the settings pops out like a real button, and you can "visit"
3D-looking landmarks through maps. None of these factors would be
your main motivator to buy the phone, but they prove that Amazon
was paying attention to the details.

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Another design quirk is its Enhanced Carousel. Although you can
rearrange your apps just like you would on a more traditional
smartphone, the carousel lets you scroll through the ones you've
recently used, and, in some cases, take action right from the
homescreen.

Generally, I liked using the carousel, but the format was
definitely more useful for some apps more than others. Email was
great because I could see (and respond to) recent messages. The
calendar app let me check out everything that I had going on each
day at a glance.

It would be amazing if Twitter or Facebook eventually integrated
parts of their timelines into the home screen too. As is, you
just get suggestions for other apps you can download.

As far as Firefly, Amazon boasts that it can recognize and give
you information about over 100 million items, as well as
recognize web addresses, phone numbers, or QR codes. Although I
didn't find myself naturally using Firefly very often, there
is something thrilling about watching your phone figure
out what you're looking at. I found it most useful for
identifying music, easily dialing a phone number that I had on a
business card without having to type it in, and checking whether
a physical book was also available for Kindle. Power users, on
the other hand, might love it for scanning products to see if
they're cheaper on Amazon than in-store.

Like the easy integration with Amazon Prime services, Firefly
will encourage Amazon fans to spend more money, by making
purchases completely seamless.

Like Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets, the goal of the Fire phone,
and especially the Firefly feature, is to keep you locked into
Amazon's world of shopping. And because it lets you compare
prices of real-world objects to what Amazon sells them for,
the feature is a showrooming nightmare.

Finally, there's Mayday, a feature that lets you hit a call
button and have a live video chat with an Amazon representative
if you have any trouble with your phone. The Amazon rep can even
doodle on your screen to walk you through what you're supposed to
do.

To be honest, I didn't need to use Mayday once. In fact, I
totally forgot about it until my editor was reading this review
and asked what I thought about it. So, that either means I'm a
tech genius or the Fire phone is so easy to use you won't need
Mayday at all. (However, Steve Kovach used Mayday when he
tested the newest Kindle Fire tablet last year and found the
Mayday representatives to be quite pleasant.)

Here's what it looks like when you use Firefly on a
book:

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In summary, the new software features in the Fire phone are
pretty nifty, but they likely won't offer enough to entice people
to buy Amazon's phone over a normal Android phone or iPhone.

The Basics

The first thing you notice about the Fire phone is how great the
screen looks. It has a 4.7-inch screen, which is slightly larger
than the iPhone 5S, which has a 4-inch screen. It also has an HD
1280x720 resolution that looked great even when I was playing
with it outside.

For as great as the screen looks, though, I wish Amazon offered a
"phablet"-sized, 5.7-inch option like Samsung's Galaxy Note 3.
I've been using a phablet for months, and am addicted to the
increased real estate. Since content consumption is hard-wired
into the Fire's very existence — I watched more Prime Instant
Videos in the last three days than I ever have before — it really
feels like its screen should have a bigger option.

The other issue I had with the Fire phone was that, because it's
running a modified version of Android, I couldn't download some
of the apps that I usually would. Four of my basics — LinkedIn,
Snapchat, Venmo, Secret — aren't available for the Amazon Fire
yet. And if you use Google services like Gmail and Google Maps,
you're out of luck. It's frustrating.

The camera, however, was a definite pro. My photos looked great,
and it came with a host of fun editing tools baked in. For the
selfie lover, you can whiten your teeth, reduce red-eye, and get
rid of blemishes with a few easy swipes, while also futzing with
your contrast and saturation all in one fell swoop. Plus, the
magnetic headphones really didn't get as tangled as the model
Apple ships with its iPhones.

The Math

One of the biggest surprises when the Fire phone launched was the
price. Rumors had pegged it as dirt-cheap, but it rings up at a
more standard $199.99 with a two-year contract from AT&T. You
can also get it for $650 through 24 monthly installments of
$27.09. With that, though, you get a free year of Prime (usually
$99), 32 GB of memory instead of 16 GB, and unlimited free online
photo storage. How does that measure up to other options out
there? Prime gets you free two-day shipping on many items from
Amazon, access to thousands of free streaming movies and TV
shows, and over 1 million streaming songs.

The Fire phone is about $100 cheaper than a 32 GB iPhone 5S,
which you can get on contract for $299, and the same price as a
16 GB Samsung Galaxy S5, which is $199.99 on contract, and comes
with the option to buy 64 GB more memory for $43.95.

The free Prime membership is definitely huge, but if you didn't
already have one, be warned: I can almost guarantee that you'll
end up spending the difference on new stuff (and Amazon thinks so, too).

Conclusion

Overall, the Fire phone is a solid deal: You get all the
smartphone basics, with some added bonuses, for a price that's in
line with the market. Neither the gesture controls nor Firefly
are life-changing, but they're fun and useful.

The GIFs in this review don't do dynamic perspective justice: Go
to an AT&T store if you're interested to check them out for
yourself. If you are obsessed with Amazon and want to make it
even easier to buy stuff off it or like to watch a lot of movies
or shows on-the-go, buying the phone makes a lot of sense: You're
essentially paying $100 for Prime and a phone built to take
advantage of it.

However, if you care about getting the latest apps and services
or having a big screen, you might want to consider other
options.

This is a phone for folks who only want to live in Amazon's world
and don't need access to the latest and greatest apps and
services rival devices offer. I suspect most people don't fall
into that category though.